Mobile agent system for ubiquitous computing; new way to cope with the wide-area, large-scale ubiquitous computing environment of near future. Allows access to personal and collaborative computing services anywhere, via varied desktop and mobile computing devices.

Agent-based communication models show great promise to operate in unpredictable, metamorphic environments, such as mobile computing networks. Excellent basic explanations, clear arguments, well reasoned; from Crossroads, ACM student magazine.

Modular object-oriented application to index files across networks. Consists of plug-in type data retrieval system, webserver, peer-to-peer connections for network-wide information gathering, retrieval; has features of OSs, database management systems, distributed networking. [Open Source, GPL]

Short, annotated, alphabetically sorted list and links, part of larger system.

A distributed operating system based on the concepts of object replication, component model support and persistence. It consists of a L4 microkernel and a set of distributed objects acting at the user level. [Open source]

Global Layer Unix; technology trends in high-speed, low-latency LANs suggest convergence of hardware in Massively Parallel Processors, MPPs, and Networks of Workstations, NOWs. Relative to many MPPs, NOWs offer more cost-effectiveness and scalability, and less hardware and software development time. Soon, the main difference between NOWs and MPPs will be OS software.

Grenoble Universities Integrated Distributed Environment. Object-oriented distributed OS to develop and operate distributed applications on local area networks of workstations and servers. Joint project Bull, IMAG Research Institute; related to COMANDOS, BROADCAST Esprit Projects.

Distributed Unix operating system for Stanford FLASH multiprocessor; survives hardware and software faults, performance near commercial Unix. Arranged as internal system of independent kernels (cells) for reliability, scalability.

hierarchically clustered OS implemented on Hector multiprocessor; manages system resources in clusters, using tight coupling within clusters, loose coupling across clusters. Succeeded by Tornado.

Researches distributed and realtime operating systems, communication, software engineering. Part of Department of Computer Science at the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg. Some information on site not in English.

Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group; research focus: extensible and flexible system services: filesystems, networking, languages. Projects: 'C, Chord, Click, Exokernel (Exopc), Grid, Prolac, RON, and SFS. Funding: DARPA, NSF; AT&T, IBM, Intel. Many open source downloads.

Software package to enhance Unix kernels (7 so far) and Linux with cluster computing abilities. Lets any size cluster of x86-based workstations and servers work cooperatively as if part of one system. [Open Source, GPL]

Details active project to illustrate use of MOSIX to create clusters of surplus machines that can be used to provide network services, application resources.

An operating system that lets applications be built simpler. The system selects and combines resources from the network semi-automatically.

Simple, yet efficient distributed shared memory (DSM) system; a user-level library plus header files supports DSM on groups of Unix workstations. Runs on 4.3BSD/M68k, HP-UX/PA-RISC, IRIX 5.2/MIPS, SunOS 4.1/SPARC. [Open Source, public domain]

Distributed OS gives one system image to/over a networked cluster of workstations, research project, Berkeley, John Outerhoust group; high file system performance via client and server caching, process migration to use idle machines; testbed for research in file systems (log-structured, striped, RAID), crash recovery.

Support for Multimedia in Operating systems, Lancaster University: microkernel OS with facilities to support distributed realtime and multimedia applications and ODP-based multimedia distributed application platforms.

Brief, simple layman's treatment of Carnegie Mellon University's Odyssey project; IBM Research's Autonomic Computing initiative; Microsoft's Farsite project. [CNN.com]

Object-oriented operating system for large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors. Minimizes data sharing via careful design: often eliminates data sharing even when sharing appears natural. Successor to Hurricane.

Gives distributed OS services needed to build applications that are wide-area, highly available, incrementally scalable, dynamically reconfiguring, with mechanisms for: resource discovery, global namespace, remote process execution, resource management, authentication, security.

Distributed operating system, to be fully object-oriented, preemptively multithreaded/tasked, event/message-driven. Little code yet, but design documents and links are interesting, useful reading.